Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Google’s Digitized Book Project Hinges on a Retro Kind of Search - NYTimes.com

See the full article for details on how Google is spending $7M on a print advertising campaign to inform authors about its book digitization plans

The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.

Under the proposed settlement, reached on Oct. 28 and still subject to court approval, there must be an effort the court finds “reasonable and practicable” to find authors and publishers — especially copyright holders of so-called orphan books, which are still in copyright but long out of print. So the task means placing at least one advertisement in every country in the world.